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SIMD-accelerated computer vision on a $2 microcontroller
An accelerated FAST feature detector for the ESP32-S3 leveraging 128-bit SIMD instructions, achieving ~2x the performance of the reference implementation.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 966 posts.
392
Hand Drawn QR Codes (2025)
I really like QR codes. Recently I purchased a new sticky-note-like pad from a new local stationery store in Minneapolis. The sheets have a 10x10 grid and 2x10 grid. I knew what I wanted to...
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Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
The bottleneck has shifted from implementation to specification.
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Use boring languages with LLMs
Why coding agents perform better in cohesive ecosystems like Go than fragmented ones like JavaScript or Python
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Writing my own text editor, and daily-driving it
A programmer's text editor is their castle
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Training AI to Paint with Code
I'm a designer and creative technologist based in Brooklyn, NY.
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They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pascal 7
Why half a million people learned to program in Pascal, when you’d think they had no earthly reason to.
398
The 'Hidden' Costs of Great Abstractions
In the world of computing, we tend to abstract away complexity. Doing so seems liberating. It enables us to focus on the bigger picture. Unfortunately, in doing so, the fidelity of our understanding often decreases. We sometimes end up blinding ourselves.
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A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing
It is Friday. KPMG , the consultancy behemoth that delivers business Venn diagrams for outrageous prices, informs us that 70 percent of UK business leaders will keep spending on AI even when they can’t prove it does anything — the consultancy helpfully suggests we stop calling it “investment” and start calling it a…
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Java is fast, code might not be
Fixing common Java anti-patterns took an app from 1,198ms to 239ms. Eight patterns that compile fine and pass code review but silently drain CPU and balloon heap, with benchmarks and code fixes for each
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Using LLM for confidence scoring is a bad idea
LLM-based agents can do a lot of tasks. Or, at least, they can appear to do them. For example, they write code, summarize papers, plan trips, and fill in forms. If you ask one for a probability or a confidence score, it will give you one of those too. I have seen many agent designers use LLMs to generate confidence…
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A decades-old bug in Knuth's long division (TAOCP Vol II, Algorithm 4.3.1D)
A long division story
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If DSPy is so great, why isn't anyone using it?
Any sufficiently complicated AI system contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden implementation of half of DSPy.
408
WATaBoy: JIT-Ing Game Boy Instructions to WASM Beats a Native Interpreter
A Game Boy emulator runs faster than a native interpreter by dynamically recompiling SM83 to WebAssembly, effectively making JIT possible on iOS.
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Fable Took My Job
Fable is cool yo, it takes jobs yo, - Dario "steve" Altman
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Just Use Go
Hey, dipshit. You know what compiles in two seconds, deploys as a single binary, and doesn't shit itself when a transitive dependency gets yanked from npm at 3am? Go. The same way HTML has been sitting there since the dawn of the goddamn internet waiting for you to stop overcomplicating the frontend, Go has been…
411
Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
The first batches of Quake executables, quake.exe and vquake.exe were programmed on HP 712-60 running NeXT and cross-compiled with DJGPP running on a DEC Alpha server 2100A. In June of 1996, having shipped their title but concerned with NeXT stagnation, id Software switched their development stack.
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Direct Win32 API, weird-shaped windows, and why they mostly disappeared
The nice thing about Win32 is that it does not try to talk you out of any of this. It just gives you the messages, the handles, the drawing APIs, and enough rope to ...
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Only 17% of all 64-bit Integers are products of two 32-bit integers
In software programming, the product between two integers is often computed to a fixed number of bits with overflow. Consider 8-bit integers. If you multiply 127 by 127, you get back the number 1 as an 8-bit unsigned integer, with an overflow. The actual full product is 16129. To represent 16129, you typically use 16…
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sp.h: Fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library
Over the past year, I’ve been working on fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library. It is not a simple wrapper on top of libc; it doesn’t depend on libc except when required to by the platform. To my knowledge, there is nothing like it.
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Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools
This frame of Screamer 2 was rendered not by an original 3dfx card and not by an emulator, but by an FPGA reimplementation of the Voodoo 1 that I wrote in SpinalHDL. Available on GitHub .
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Rebasing in Magit
I read Ian Whitlock’s article on why he can’t quit Magit and it inspired me to share more about Magit from my perspective. This article will focus on rebasing.
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Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15
AI-related upgrades like the built-in AI Assistant, extended computation-augmented generation and the Wolfram Agent Tools framework. Advances in TimeSeries & Tabular. New categorical data, ModelFit automated model selection, symbolic music. Efficient handling of gigabyte-sized notebooks. Gains in the already-robust…
418
An interactive intro to quadtrees
An interactive exploration of quadtrees. Start with brute-force spatial search, build recursive space partitioning step by step, then use it for point lookups, range queries, nearest-neighbor search, collision detection, and image compression.
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Some C habits I employ for the modern day
Despite it being the first “proper” programming language I learned—by reading K&R front-to-back no less—I don’t write C too terribly often nowadays. Playing resonite has gotten me into writing a load of C# for modding the game, and most of what I do day-to-day is automating the tedium on my computer, which gets…
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Why write code in 2026
A bunch of reasons to write code in 2026